Blaster/Cartoon continuity
In the Generation 1 cartoon continuity, Blaster is one happenin' dude! Looking for more information? Then keep your dial tuned to this station! Yow! ''The Transformers'' cartoon Blaster was a fun-loving, hip and happening robot. Loud and energetic, he was happy to share his choice of rockin' tunes with anyone, whether they really wanted to hear them or not. Blaster appeared out of nowhere one day during Wheeljack's demonstration of the modifications he'd made to the Dinobots. To aid him in his presentation, Wheeljack requested that Blaster play something "nice", and the communicator responded by transforming and queueing up some rock 'n' roll/big band fusion music that Grimlock then started playing with a finely-placed laser-breath blast to Blaster's buttons. While the other Autobots were less than appreciative of Blaster's musical choice, Grimlock danced to the music to demonstrate his new levels of finesse. Blaster was among the Autobots who were exiled from Earth as part of a villainous conspiracy between Megatron and Shawn Berger. Everything turned out okay in the end, though. At a not-so-secret EJK testing facility for the new Ultra Plane, Blaster was sitting in the back of Ironhide's vehicle mode and didn't seem to notice the fact that Soundwave was sitting right next to him -— at least until the Decepticon tape deck launched Ravage, whom Blaster quickly transformed to grab. The cat turned to attack the Autobot while his master escaped to report to Megatron. Blaster continued to tussle until Ironhide transformed into robot mode and threw them both out of his caboose. After being initially distracted by the Ultraplane's destruction, the Autobots returned to EJK's lab to confront the Decepticons. Blaster greatly appreciated Jazz's taste in music to confound the hapless villains. While attending a concert with Spike and Carly, Blaster decided to share the show with the other Autobots by flooding their communications channels with the music, though only Cosmos and Jazz seemed to appreciate it. Unfortunately, his broadcast also disrupted an emergency communique from the Haley Observatory, meaning the Autobots were unable to respond and stop the Decepticons stealing the Voltronic Galaxer. Searching for the Decepticons, Blaster and Cosmos were captured and brought to the villains' moonbase, where Blaster was welded into place to be used as a trans-scrambler for Megatron's scheme to use the Voltronic Galaxer to ransom energy from the Earth by disrupting the planet's communications. Blaster tipped the Autobots off to his location by broadcasting his music over the system, and once the Decepticons were thwarted, Blaster was assigned to the abandoned moonbase with Cosmos, but quickly got into trouble with Prime again for his music. Later, Blaster and Tracks helped the New York police crack a car theft ring by posing as an attractive target for punks to steal. After Blaster teamed up with car thief Raoul, they learned that Megatron was behind the criminal operation, stealing cars to rebuild them into transforming drones. Blaster defended the Washington Bridge from the Decepticon drones alongside the other Autobots, but they were nearly overwhelmed by sheer numbers. After Ratchet realized the cars were remote-controlled, Blaster jammed the frequency, allowing the Autobots to attack and defeat the Decepticons. Blaster proved pivotal in saving Cosmos and some robotic insecticide from the Morphobots, when, with no options left, he randomly tried exposing the alien plants to a blast of music, that caused them to recoil away from the Autobots. Soon afterward, the Autobots were attacked by the malevolent Kremzeek, an energy life form created by Megatron. Blaster and a small number of other Autobots were the only ones to stay functional long enough to be sprayed with an insulating foam that protected them from the creature's attacks. The Autobot team chased it to Japan, where it wreaked havoc with the massive electronics industry there. Managing to trap Kremzeek inside his chest compartment, Blaster thought he could short the electrical imp out with his own energy, but this only made the situation worse, as Kremzeek absorbed all the juice Blaster pumped into it and split into dozens of copies of itself. One of the copies managed to slip inside Blaster, and after the other Kremzeeks were seemingly destroyed, it jumped out of his chest and the pursuit began again. Blaster was watching "As the Kitchen Sinks" with his Auto-buddies when Prime informed them that Tracks and Bumblebee were late returning from their supply run. Suspecting foul play, the Autobots took off to search for their missing comrades. While on the search, Blaster was forcibly transformed by a Creamy Cream billboard then carted away by the big game hunter Lord Chumley and his butler Dinsmoore as bait to lure Optimus Prime into a hunt. Chumley apparently couldn't think of a suitably dastardly device in which to store Blaster, though, as he was totally absent from Chumley's prisoner showcase later on. Tracks and Blaster were reunited with Raoul when they saved their human friend and his Bop Crew from a bunch of hoodlums in the employ of the Dancitron nightclub. The pair investigated the club, but Blaster did not share Tracks's suspicion that something unsavoury was going on inside its walls, enjoying the atmosphere and dancing with the human clubbers. After saving Raoul again when a mind-controlled train driver sent the train Raoul was in hurtling out of control, Blaster was forced to re-evaluate his opinion, and used with Teletraan I to deduce that the club was controlling its patrons with hypnotic signals. Thinking he could counter them his own sonic powers, Blaster returned to the club, where he discovered the culprit was his Decepticon counterpart Soundwave, who he engaged in a fierce sonic duel. Soundwave proved the more powerful of the two, but Blaster won the day by using Dancitron's own sound system to boost his powers. Blaster joined in Optimus Prime in travelling to Cybertron to stop Megatron from using Vector Sigma to bring his new Stunticons to life. They failed thanks to a cadre of Centurion droids Megatron sent to delay them, so as a counter-measure, Blaster and the other Autobots created the Aerialbots from five Cybertronian shuttles as Earth vehicles. With the Key to Vector Sigma in Megatron's grasp, Alpha Trion was forced to sacrifice himself to activate Vector Sigma and bring the Aerialbots to life, a decision Blaster loudly, if vainly, opposed. Returning to Earth to confront the Stunticons, Blaster impressively used his sound system to generate a miniature earthquake using sonic vibrations, but Wildrider just sailed over the cracks and smashed into Blaster's face. On a second encounter, Blaster used his sonics to collapse a tree into Breakdown's path, but the Stunticon just used it as a ramp while Wildrider casually drove by and ran Blaster over. Ouch. Blaster and Cosmos were sent on an inter-galactic shopping trip to pick up more Ingredient X for Perceptor's protective chemical spray, Corrostop, only to find there was none left in the entire universe. Soon after, when the Stunticons returned performing a series of heists for Megatron, Blaster joined Prime and Bumblebee in hunting down Motormaster. He didn't do much, but he did get to witness the most awesome game of chicken ever, when Prime totalled Motormaster. In the year 2005, Blaster was assigned to the communications hub at Autobot City on Earth. Notes *As part of his hip and happening personality in the Generation 1 cartoon, Blaster's speech patterns were initially modelled on those of a radio DJ. While he would drop the occasional rhyme as a matter of lyrical cadence, slowly but surely, this aspect of his language began to override all others, really kicking in with the late season 2 episodes "Cosmic Rust" and "Masquerade", which featured more rhyming lines than not, and carrying on through his brief but memorable role in The Transformers: The Movie. With the advent of season three, any sense of gradual progression went out the window as Blaster suddenly became a cut-rate Wheelie, with nearly every line he spoke being an often-lengthy rhyming couplet. While his DJ-like speech patterns never really returned, "Ghost in the Machine" and "Carnage in C-Minor" did provide some notable instances of him talking normally as a result of the gravity of a situation. *Blaster's absence from the second half of The Transformers: The Movie is often a talking point among fans. It stems from a deleted plotline from early drafts of the movie, in which he would have led several other 1984 and '85 Autobots as a team of guerrilla fighters, defending Earth against the Decepticons while Ultra Magnus and the other Autobots went into space to stop Unicron from feeding on the energy of the planet. While this plot had been excised by the time of dialogue recording, the shooting script for the film does include another pair of deleted lines that explain Blaster's absence, as he and Inferno tell Magnus's Autobots that they will cover them as they escape on the shuttles. *The script for "Fight or Flee" noted the Communication Autobot of Paradron as a "primative Blaster". The intended family resemblance didn't really make it on-screen, unfortunately. Category:characters Category:Communications specialists Category:Autobots